Globalisation, the happy notion of national and regional economies merging into a single hi-tech transnational financial feast, has become the nineties' buzzword. But despite all the hype, there's fundamentally nothing new going on.
For a start, there's no need to clutter our vocabulary with another superfluous word. Globalisation? Let's just stick with capitalism. That's what it is - albeit on a bigger scale.
From its inception, capitalism has been an ever-expanding system of exploitation, production and exchange. Perhaps no-one predicted this better than Karl Marx. In 1848, he wrote in the Communist Manifesto: "The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. The cheap prices of its commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, that is, to become bourgeois themselves. In one word it creates a world after its own image."
Unfortunately, his stigmatisation by regressive Stalinist states and the ideologically driven ridicule of his credentials by Western intellectuals have tended to consign the great wealth of his ideas and insights - written 150 years ago, when he was not yet 30 - to the dustbin of history.
However, as we slide into the 21st century of consumerist utopia, a curious contradiction is beginning to stir, which defies conventional wisdom and proclaims the unthinkable - that Marx's time has come. Doubtless this is because more and more people are realising, to paraphrase the Tory election poster, that capital isn't working.
"It's time to go back to Marx," says Ellen Meiksins Wood, co-editor of In Defence of History: Marx- ism and the Postmodern Agenda.
Professor of Political Science at Toronto's York University, Ellen Meiksins Wood welcomes the collapse of the Stalinist regimes of the Cold War because, she believes, it clears the way for more critical attention to the weaknesses of capitalism.
"Marx is more relevant than ever," she says, "because he, more effectively than any other person now or then, devoted his life to explaining the systemic logic of capitalism."
So, just when the globalised world was about to bin Marx, it would seem that the real value of his ideas and insights is being reclaimed.
This year, MacMillan Press has published two volumes entitled Marxian Economics - a Reap- praisal.
One of the contributors, Alan Freeman, from the Department of Economic Dynamics at Greenwich University, London, says: "Marx stands out as the pre-eminent economic thinker. We are always told that Marx is out of date. But on all the big questions like why is there war, oppression, inequality, financial crises, I think Marx gives the most effective answers."
Freeman says that comparing Marx with David Ricardo, the 19th-century father of classical economics and guru for today's global free marketeers, is "like comparing Einstein with Newton". That is not to say Marx dismisses Ricardo and other classical thinkers such as Adam Smith and John Locke.
Why Ricardo and Adam Smith have become lionised today by the likes of the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organisation and the ruling coterie of G7 governments, is that they do not shed any light on the underlying social relationships of capitalism. Ultimately, the capitalist market appears as something mystical, a law unto itself - which is handy for maintaining the privileges of the ruling classes.
It is telling, as Alan Freeman notes, that no university in the socalled Free World affords Marx any space on its economics curriculum. This seems rather odd considering many of the most pressing social problems in today's globalised world are at once demystified and explained using Marx's analysis: the exploding gap between rich and poor; the political leverage of transnational capital; corporate downsizing and re-engineering; stagnation of wages; the normalisation of lowwage, casual jobs; alienation and atomisation of society; dwindling productive investment; the relentless growth of unemployment to 800 million worldwide, and so on.
However, it would be selling Marx short to see him simply as a formidable moral conscience, holding the ruling classes to account. He is that and more. He bequeathed a wealth of analytical tools with which to rationalise, understand and reconstruct the world around us.
As the man said: "We've got nothing to lose but our chains, we've got a world to win."
Finian Cunningham is a journalist based in Belfast.